Gateway P6822 Hangs On Gateway Logo Startup Screen

[Chris Nicola]

I have a Gateway P6822 that has been upgraded with an SSD running Win 10 64 bit. Recently it started hanging on the startup screen. This is the screen that apears after pressing the power button that says press F2 for bios setup and F10 for Boot options. Sometimes it might hang with a blank screen.

If I enter the bios and set bios defaults save and exit it might boot normally. It seems temperamental. Sometimes it will boot normally and sometimes it hangs.

I have tried removing the battery and power cord and pressing the power button to discharge the capacitor and reset. I have run Windows memory diagnostic and it found no errors. I have cleaned the fan. The heat sink has been cleaned and reseated with new thermal paste. I have removed and reinserted the SSD in case there was a bad conection. I have tried reinserting the old HDD and that does not solve the problem. I have tried removing the old aged battery but that does not help. I have upgraded to the latest bios and plan to do a Win 10 repair install in case that helps. Win 10 fast boot is enabled. I don't know if that will make any difference.

Is there anything else that might be causing this problem? Your advice would be apreciated.

Kind regards
Chris

[rproffitt]

There are many reasons for this. HOWEVER this appears to be a laptop from about 2007 so old age may be the cause. If the owner is attached to these we find a working model on eBay and make a good one out of the two laptops. For those that don't do this a lot, it's usually the motherboard that has failed.

This unit ( https://gatewaycomputers.fandom.com/wiki/P-6822 ) is a 2007 or so Core2Duo laptop that no shop would take in for repair with warranty.

https://www.ebay.com/b/Gateway-Intel-Core-2-Duo-4-GB-RAM-PC-Laptops-Netbooks/177/bn_16046298 finds these go for about 100USD.

[Chris Nicola]

Rproffitt, thank you very much for your reply and the Ebay link. I suspected that might be a possibility. If the motherboard has gone, then it might not be cost effective to repair it. In the meantime, I will keep trying various hacks.

Kind regards
Chris

[rproffitt]

• other hacks.

I don't call such hacks but the old tech method we call "make it smaller."

We don't need the boot drive, no more than one stick RAM, and what else can go? Just yesterday I worked an 2013 laptop that was headed to the bin but I found that the WiFi card was causing issues. Given we have a bone yard to pull from I grabbed the first card off the pile and that cured that one. This is not me telling you that's it but in most laptops this is another part we can do without while looking for a cause.

-> I'd also consider a new CMOS battery since those are 25 cents in bulk here. We never test that battery (if we do it's 75 bucks on the bill!) We often forget to charge the dollar for the part as we work the problems out. It's a cheap part, can cause issues yet some clients want to debate or test it (and if they do, we add 75 bucks to the bill.) To this day I can't guess why folk spend more than a minute on that item.

RECAP: MAKE IT SMALL AS POSSIBLE. If you want to boot an OS go get something on CD, USB, DVD or if the machine goes back that far, diskettes.

Finally I want to repeat "make it small as possbile." Unplug all USB or other connections.

[Chris Nicola]

Thank you rproffitt for those valuable troubleshooting steps to "make it smaller".

I changed the battery and reset the date in bios a while back (it was nearly dead). I got the p68 going again, and it has been stable for 3 days, but don't know how much longer it will last. I tried to repair install Win 10 but it failed. I ran chkdsk and it found errors and fixed them. I ran it again just to be sure. From an elevated command prompt, I ran sfc /scannow and it previously failed but I finally got it to work and it said it fixed some errors. I also ran DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth and that seemed to do something as well.

While I suspect the motherboard may have an issue, it might just have been a corrupt master boot record. Time will tell.

Thank you for all your help and advice, I really appreciate it.

Kind regards
Chris

[rproffitt]

That sounds like progress. If so, huzzah!

Now about that hard disk drive. I'll share that we encounter far too many Seagates so if it's a Seagate we usually can guess it's that.

-> Here's the quick test. We use SPECCY (what is, where is, how to use is all over the web.) Install and run Speccy. Now skip to the hard disk SMART values and if you see values 01 and/or 07 off in the thousands then the drive is beyond suspect. We now have dozens of good to near new used HDDs as we swap so many over to SSD so for charity cases we'll pull one of those, clone the drive and re-test. If the OS is too banged up, we do a clean install. The old HDD can go into some under 10 buck USB HDD case for the client to copy their files out.